ABSTRACT
‘We Keep America on Top of the World’ was a slogan CBS used for a part of 1985 to promote its news division. In its multiple meanings it captures eloquently the ambivalent identity of American journalism. Its surface meaning, of course, refers to the role of the journalist as professional and public servant, providing the public with up-to-date information about world affairs. But underneath lie several other meanings, equally important to understanding American journalism. The journalist, first of all, is not only a provider of information but also a political ideologist. Journalism gives the world political meaning, and it stands, as the slogan suggests, in a close if not always comfortable relation to the institutions of state power. The slogan itself, moreover, is a promotional device, and points to the reality of journalism as a business. It seems unlikely to me that the journalists at CBS, if they had been asked collectively to come up with an expression of their own identity, would have picked, ‘We Keep America on Top of the World.’ But of course they were not asked to do any such thing. The slogan and the attitude toward news it implies were selected by people whose business is to sell television shows. Finally, if we look back at the historical context of this slogan, as we will in the essay which bears it as a title, we will see that it reflects a complicated relation of journalism to its audience. This was the height of Ronald Reagan’s popularity, and a time when patriotic sentiments were very much in fashion—a time, I think it is fair to say, of collective narcissism. And it was a time when journalists felt particularly strongly the uncertainty about whether they should be standing back from popular sentiments, maintaining the detachment of the neutral professional, or, on the contrary, immersing themselves in those sentiments.
